Think in sync

By Kanika Sharma |Posted 31-Mar-2014

Bandra's Kulture Shop spearheads graphic art, and was launched in November last year. Entering the virtual world, they announced their Katalyst collection, recently. The idea space has clubbed notable personalities from film, design, music and astronomy with India’s leading graphic artists

Kulture Shop, a city-based indie design store is your go-to place for leading Indian graphic art from all over the world. To celebrate their website launch, Arjun Charanjiva, its founder felt that, “The explosive creative possibilities of putting together leading Indian graphic artists from Kulture Shop (Sameer Kulavoor, Lokesh Karekar, Aviral Saxena and Kunal Anand) with Katalysts (innovators) across music, film, design and technology was central to the birthing of the Katalyst collection.” Actress Kalki Koechlin, Shaa’ir + Func, Pentagram’s Randolph Correia, designer and photographer Shahid Datawala and spacecraft designer Dr Susmita Mohanty were the Katalysts.

Pic Courtesy/ Iza Viola

Culture kitschSpeaking of her collaboration with Kulavoor, Kalki Koechlin shares, “It was new for me, and a great idea. Sameer is easy to work with because he is direct and to the point like me. We hardly talked and would just send videos, images and ideas over mail. We finally came up with a mixture of Bollywood kitsch images and spoofed a famous line from the movie Anand.” Kulavoor adds, “ ‘Zindagi aur maut ke khel mein hum sab santre hai’ is the centrepiece of the design with diagram-like drawings of dance moves inspired by actors like Jeetendra, Govinda, Jaya Prada and Helen.”

Kalki Koechlin with Sameer Kulavoor, playing with oranges denoting the fun element in their design, Santre. The orange motif is picked from Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s film Anand.

Collector/designer Shahid Datawala and Lokesh shared love for design objects that came to life in Estree. “Spacecraft designer Susmita Mohanty was like an excited teacher and Aviral a wonderstruck pupil in the creation of Space Terminal Mumbai 2059 — a perfect match. Randolph Correia of Pentagram and Shaa’ir + Func, and Kunal Anand (Creative Director at Kulture Shop), close friends, tapped into their mutual interest in beats and sounds in the creation of Frequency,” he adds.

PIC COURTESY/ TOM KOSHY

Believing Santre to be the surprise outcome, Charanjiva is excited to offer these designs as limited editions — 100 art prints and 150 tees of these works. Also available are the large-sized unique editions that were showcased during their launch event.